Macworld Expo
Microsoft wants you to know that it's not just the Mac that's holding a 25th birthday party: 2009 marks the 25th year that Redmond has developed software for Apple's quarter-centarian computer.

Micro-blogging site Twitter had to temporarily suspend accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Britney Spears and other celebrities after they were hijacked by miscreants and used to spread scandalous and false information that appeared to come from their owners.

Astronomers, publishers and computing experts claimed a "significant milestone" in the New Year's Day edition of heavyweight boffinry journal Nature, saying it is "the first time a major scientific journal has used a 3-D PDF of graphics in an article".

If you thought Motorola’s phones were a load of junk, then you were right – sort of. Because the company’s unveiled what it’s claimed is the world’s first mobile phone featuring a body made from recycled water bottles.

Review
The relentless march of the iPod into the price bracket known as 'Good God! How much?' makes the near simultaneous release by Sony and Samsung of the new runts of their MP3 player litters more interesting than would otherwise be the case. A couple of 2GB USB stick-style MP3 players with FM radios and screens each for under £40? Can't be bad... or can it?

2009 will finally see Microsoft Office documents arrive on the iPhone, it seems, with Soonr allowing access to documents stored in the cloud while QuickOffice makes good on its promise of local editing.

The largely unexpected announcement that 26-year-old Matt Smith will become the next Doctor Who was possibly not quite as unexpected in the actor's home town of Northampton, according to bookmakers Paddy Power.

Boffins at the UK's famous National Physical Laboratory (NPL) - birthplace of the Dambusters' bouncing bomb and perhaps the internet - say they have used an electron microscope to analyse Viking swords. In a surprise twist, it turns out that the old-time Scandinavian pests, many of whom moved to England to become our ancestors, actually imported their best steel from Afghanistan.

England is catching up with Scotland and Wales in liberalising mobile phone use in hospitals, a mere five years after it was established that such use didn't present a significant risk to medical equipment.

There’s nothing wrong with sitting in your car, flipping switches and pretending to be Captain Kirk navigating Sulu and the gang through space. But now you can do it in style, because a replica of the captain’s chair from Star Trek is available.

US airline Continental says it will carry out "the first biofuel flight by a commercial carrier using algae as a fuel source" tomorrow. Previous airliner biofuel trials have used controversial "first-generation" feedstocks, seen as contributing to world hunger and deforestation, apart from a recent New Zealand test involving jatropha nuts.

Two heads are better than one, but does the same apply for two laptop screens? If you want to see for yourself your pockets had better be deep because the price of Lenovo’s dual-screen ThinkPad is now confirmed.

The rumor mill, being stoked by IBM employees talking on a pro-union web site, has it that Big Blue is getting ready to lay off up to 16,000 employees, or about four per cent of its 400,000-strong global workforce, thanks to the slowing of the economies in the United States and Western Europe.

Comment
Back in December 2007, a confident GlassHouse Technologies, sensing good prospects in its services and consulting area, filed for an IPO. In the spring of 2008, it entered a strategic partnership with Dell, made another acquisition - and then the recession happened. The company has started firing people as it cuts costs and drives towards profitability in the words of Curtis Preston, one of the world's most influential bloggers about backup technologies and procedures. What is going on?

Macworld Expo
Take your pick - the iTunes Store is going 100 per cent DRM-free, or Apple is whacking 30 cents onto the price of each song and encouraging you to upgrade your whole iTunes library to iTunes Plus, at 30 cents (UK 20p) per song. Apple prefers the 100 per cent DRM-free line, naturally, but there's a price being paid to the record labels, and with "high-quality audio... that’s virtually indistinguishable from the original recording" defined as 256-Kbps AAC, there seems to be headroom for another bite in a year or two.

If you were the incoming president of the United States, and you wanted to gauge the effect of an economic stimulus package geared to information technology as a means to create jobs, who would you ask for advice? The economists at the Labor Department? The hot shots at IDC and Gartner? Or maybe the economists at MIT, the University of Chicago, or Stanford University? Nah. Forget that. President-elect Obama's transition team went right to the source: Sam Palmisano, chairman and chief executive officer at IBM.

Besides providing some of the biggest technical innovation of 2008, the cloud also wins the award for most amorphous product definition. Few people define "the cloud" or "cloud computing" the same way, leading to market noise and a wealth of misinformation.

Macworld Expo
In one of the least eventful keynote speeches in recent memory, Apple's SVP Phil Schiller, filling in for the ailing Steve Jobs, announced upgrades to iLife and iWork, an upgraded 17-inch MacBook, and iTunes Store pricing-structure changes and DRM-removal plans.

Golf isn't exactly known as a sport of deafening noises, but a provocative (albeit suspiciously anecdotal) study is making the rounds claiming golfers may risk losing their hearing by using newfangled thin-faced titanium drivers.

Motherboard and server maker Super Micro Computer said today it was not going to make its expected numbers for its fiscal second quarter ended December 31. The economic meltdown is the culprit - of course. But the good news is that Super Micro says that business picked up in December - just not enough to offset a bad November.